skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please don't mistake the fact that I didn't bother debunking each individual point from the article here on Hacker News for either ignorance or apathy with regard to IP laws. I'm well aware of the opposing point of view and the common arguments made in its favour. I just haven't yet seen any real evidence that supports the kind of absurdly generic claim made by Falkvinge in this article.

And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else.

Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess.

Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess.

Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess.

The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer.

And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on.

One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.
California Gov Moves to Reduce Gas Prices
By and large, patents aren't intended for situations where it's likely that two people would think of the same design within the patent term. It's designed to address the situation where I spend time and money researching something, and someone else comes along and takes the results of that research and sells a competing product, undercutting me on price because he never had to invest that time or money.
> Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know.

Jane is an outlier.
That's wonderful, thank you.

I recommend Chapter 11 (starting at page 141 in the PDF file) for a detailed personal account of how he developed the 555 timer chip.

I'm also finding that the first 30 pages of the book is a very readable introduction to how semiconductors and transistors work -- it's written from an engineering mindset as opposed to the usual physics point of view.

Direct link to the book:

http://www.designinganalogchips.com/_count/countdown.pl?desi...
So articles about creationists chairing major science committees in the US get killed for being politics, but an article FROM A POLITICIAN pushing his political agenda is fine???
> Regulatory capture is an intrinsically hard problem.

What's beginning to bug me about regulatory capture is that it's a two party system: subject and observer. Seems to frail.

The brilliance of the US constitution is the balance of power between executive, legislative, and judicial. Over the long term, it seems to be largely self-correcting. Or at least correctable.

That the players are fighting each other is the only thing that's keeps everyone honest. There's some cliche about mutual distrust guaranteeing trust in a system

For all the belly aching about over bearing government and onerous regulation, it seems to me the regulators are way too cozy with the entities they regulate. In general.

Oh well. I haven't been able to imagine a system other than subject and observer. So I can't imagine a persistent system resistant to regulatory capture.

Maybe there's some novel market-based solutions which build in the right incentives. Kind of like the capitation model for healthcare, which rewards wellness (vs the USA's current fee-for-service model which rewards treating disease.).

Or maybe one of those self-managed collectives, like the managed fisheries of the north east, who's mission is to prevent the tragedy of the commons (destroying a common resource).
But frankly, there isn't anything in the GOP platform that is anthropogenic global warming denialism:

http://www.gop.com/2012-republican-platform_America/

Rather, many of those associated with the party do it, which is congruent with what he said about anti-GMO & anti-vaccine idiocy.
God says...

consulters Eat departed inflicted eating Latins tie

God says...

two ends thereof.

25:20 And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high,
covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look
one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims
be.

25:21 And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark; and in the
ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee.

25:22 And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee
from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are
upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in
commandment unto the children of Israel.
So? Nothing changes with regard to those discussions due to first to file vs. first to invent.
"(Well, he did, ... "

That's all I'm saying, really.

I see "simplicity" as orthogonal to the idea that Steve Jobs led a revolution in design. I see the so-called revolution he led as being beautiful hardware enclosures, of all sizes.
But this is just my opinion. I expect many would disagree.

I also expect many would not choose to look at these devices past their enclosures and what they see on the screen. From that limited perspective, it certainly looks like Jobs made everything simple. (Me, I think Ritchie and his colleagues did that. They dared to simplify when no one else would. Apple like many others took the ball and ran with it. But unlike many others, they also build hardware that looks fantastic... from a marketing standpoint, this is a winning combination.)
And they blew it up, the day I was born.
A Steve Jobs' Moment That Mattered: Macworld, August 1997
> The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it.

Translation:

> Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create.

That isn't even close to the same thing, and neither was your second example. Like Falkvinge, you have turned a relative position (without copyright, less of X would be made) into an absolute (without copyright, none of X would be made). I have never seen anyone, not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that.

More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position. There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.
was the zodiac, didn't kill the zodiac
Thanks, but again, you're explaining me the reasoning behind it (I get it, otherwise I wouldn't be arguing it), and losing the point about why I say it's pretentious in the first place.

Intelligence and wisdom are different qualities.
Why do you have to agree to that before hand? Why doesn't the contract prevent Paypal from suing other parties?
Click on your name to go to prefs page, turn on show dead.
I guess the hope of high-level languages is that you can build a more interesting vocabulary from complex concepts.

http://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2012/08/27/tabasco-sort-super-optimal...

It seems that there's a lot of effort going into making languages, "faster than C." Perhaps we would all be better off working with languages that just give us better abstractions -- user vocabularies. Layers on layers.

Don't get me wrong, C is the right language and a good tool for many situations. It's just that if you're going to extend the vocabulary then why do you have to change the implementation? If you want to optimize why optimize the compiler at such a low level?

Either way I just want to say that it's an interesting conversation and I'm looking forward to seeing more.
Psychology is a broad field with many subfields. Some areas are harder sciences than others (psychobiology/physiology, sensation and perception, neuroscience, some cognitive science, etc.), and some are admittedly very hand-wavy (emotion, personality, just about anything Freud said, etc.), but to dismiss all of psychological science as illegitimate is to ignore a tremendous amount of progress in understanding and human well-being that has come in the past century.
this is a noob question, but what are the buttons mapped to the home, back, menu, etc buttons?
> Because Akin was minimizing rape.

No, he wasn't. He was trying to respond to the "what about rape" argument wrt abortion.

I'm pro-abortion, but he's correct in saying that only a small fraction of abortions have anything to do with rape. (That said, age of consent and under the influence rape don't involve "negative mental state" that his argument requires.) I don't think that that fact is relevant, but it's dishonest to say that it isn't true.
Personally I am torn on this topic.

We now have this thing "information" (software, music, books, whatever) that can be useful for us, and which has the property that it can be copied infinitely without cost; but then we turn around turn it back into something that behaves like a "physical thing" by means of copyright.

On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live.

Copyright is interesting even if artists were to sell their own music independently of the labels. Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit.

Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license.

(Note these comments are true to copyright, but not for patents, which is a completely different story)
No international shipping? WTF?
>Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. It's about preventing free-riding.

Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? If half the world can free-ride on something with no marginal cost that will be produced regardless of the free-riding, the result is greater economic efficiency.

>You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft?

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like.

>Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist.

The text below was written by Thomas Jefferson -- it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Resistance times capacity is just time, 127kV/A * 470uAs/V = 59.7s, i.e. one minute.
> Because kids going around with misconceptions about what really caused the American Revolution is less dangerous than kids going around with misconceptions about reproductive issues.

Umm, if it doesn't matter whether it is true, why are we teaching it?

And no, sex ed isn't the only dangerous thing that we mis-teach kids about.

But, thanks for demonstrating your priorities.

However, I'm still unclear on why I should be paying for them.
It's not complicated. It's that there is no other option that gives more benefit (to the average user) than having all your contacts in one system. It's not going down until the privacy issue becomes enough to make average users quit, something with greater benefit appears, or something gets users to switch services en masse overnight.
Hoping to get some great music tomorrow. It would be nice to also share what types of music to expect.
A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation.

Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive?

Lobbyists say some pretty silly things, and distort reality to absurd degrees, but even then I've never heard anyone making such a black-and-white argument before a legislative assembly.

The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain?

That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?

It seems plenty of people are willing to try disrupting Big Media, given the number of people who are self-publishing books instead of relying on traditional publishers, putting their band's music on-line via their own web sites, and so on. But why does almost every success story seem to stop there? One possible explanation is that the only legal barrier between those self-publishers and an Amazon-scale operation redistributing anything good via a much better known web site and taking most of the profits is copyright...

[Edit: Clarified the wording in the last paragraph.]
While I can appreciate the technique, I haven't adopted the use of @2x images for photos. Most photos tend to hold up pretty well when scaled (soft edges and relatively low contrast). If you're serving up a portfolio, sure, but I find more value in maintaining and serving @2x (based on media queries for MDPR > 1.3) for UI elements or logos not easily reproduced in CSS/SVG.
http://blog.jetbrains.com/webide/2012/10/phpstorm-webstorm-5...
"Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation." It most definitely is.

"You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if..." What you mean is, "Do you think Microsoft would have had the same business model if...", No I don't think they would have. Would billions still have been made on the PC market? Of fucking course.

The rest of your comment is pretty ranty and without a concrete argument.
I'd make a blanket response to your "Shame if you..." points as follows: Maybe those ships have sailed and society has no need of those things anymore. If society needs those things it will find a way to pay for them. If it can't, it doesn't need them.

An industry's failure to create a sustainable business model in the face of the reality that technology has created isn't a failing of the technology. It would be nice if business would just optimize for reality instead of trying (and repeatedly failing) to bend reality through legislation.
Jane didn't put her life on social media; her friends did.

The problem with Facebook is not what it enables or what settings it has -- it's the cultural shift, engineered by a single company, that it's socially acceptable to take pictures of your friends, post them publicly, identify them by name in a worldwide, searchable database, and preserve those pictures for eternity, all without Jane's consent.

That would have been an unthinkable invasion of privacy not twenty years ago, against an individual, and now we do that to everyone in society.

If people want to preserve their own actions, that's one thing, and it's fine not to feel sorry for them. If they want to preserve other people's actions without their consent, that's another thing entirely.
Yes. I had to evolve a very crude CMS the company was using, where all content contained a text field with search terms. Because the interface and the database didn't enforced any normalization, editors generated many variations of the same terms (e.g., "batman", "the batman", "batman the dark knight"). This has obvious problems regarding information architecture.

This was solved by using an algorithm similar to the described in the OP, like a spelling corrector: for each content on the CMS (e.g., article), get the search terms and, using the entire database of search terms as a dictionary (adjusted for frequency), spill out the likely candidates as normalized "tags". That is, for a blog post where the search terms was a string like "batman, batman the dark knight rises, batman dc comics", it would be normalized to an array like ['batman', 'the dark knight rises', 'd.c. comics'].

I also used the same approach on a previous project, to normalize addresses in a real estate database (Levensthein distance). Yes, it's that useful :)
Parallella reveals 'cluster in a box' reward tiers
Mitt Romney Agrees With You
Facebook Employees Have Lost $2 Million on Average Since IPO
If you do it voluntarily, that's your own fault. But there's no way to prevent everyone you know from tagging you in photos even if you do your personal best to be private.
Sentiment Analysis using Twitter API and Scikit-Learn
> But if you want a prediction that applies to geology, evolution predicted - long before physical mechanisms were known for it - that specific land masses must have been connected in the distant past.

Evolution did no such thing.

I can't tell if you're confusing fossils (same creature, same time, must have been same location) or thinking that land masses "evolve", but either way....

> The detailed study of ant behavior was undertaken exactly because evolutionary theory predicted specific behavior.

Actually, it doesn't (there are non-slaver ants, so if their behavior is also evolutionary, you have evolution predicting X and not-X).

> Thus it is a prediction of evolution, regardless of the fact that you can try to explain it with selective breeding.

The claim was that evolution was necessary to predict something. If said something can be predicted by other means, evolution is not necessary.

As I've written before, I believe in evolution, but most of the arm-chair supporters offer false arguments.
Care to provide and example?

Your statement would only be true if the abstraction implemented something more efficiently than the C developer. This in of itself says nothing about C or X language for that matter being faster.
Let me finish that story for you ... Jane is embarrassed for couple of weeks. Jane realizes that she's not the first one in the world who lied about going to a party. A month later no one gives a damn about the story. Jane doesn't understand why the hell everyone in the media was talking about it as if it were the end of civil rights as we know them.
Oh, that brings back memories... my heathkit flashing led armband soldering project...
(from wikipedia)

"As of 2003, it was estimated that 1 billion (555 timer) units are manufactured every year."

Wow.
> The Republicans are the ones responsible for the ridiculous union pensions, because those were what they offered in concession during the 60s and 70s instead of paying the workers a fair wage at the time.

What are you babbling about? Public employees weren't unionized in the 60s and early 70s.

And, the pension stuff started in the 90s.
Designing Marketing Experiments
I am looking for a Scheme to implement inside an iOS app. I was looking into TinyScheme and Gambit, but was leaning towards TinyScheme due to its size.
Other countries force the loser in a lawsuit to cover the costs. Perhaps that's why they don't have so many companies using patents that shouldn't have been issued in the first place.